Variable Markup

Internet Retail has a good article on Rooms To Go generating in store sales through local search on Google PPC.  Rooms To Go tested the campaign twice with similar results, targeting four cities – Austin, TX; Tampa, FL; Charlotte, NC; and Raleigh, NC.  Rooms To Go provided a printable coupon for $100 off the purchase of a $1000 or more.

They found that consumers that used the coupon spent 20% more than the average customer and 86% of sales were in the store from the store from the offer.

 “If you had asked me a month ago, I would have said you can’t drive offline sales with online media,” Seaman says, “but seeing these results I am pleasantly surprised—no, pleasantly shocked.”

Local city targeting occurs by the search engine correlating the browser’s IP address to a geographic location.

I just created a Google Custom Search Engine for searching the top retail ecommerce sites on the net.  Hopefully this will be useful in finding that special gift with the holidays coming up.  I added it to the navigation bar up top. 

Personally, I’m having fun looking at the search results that google is providing.  It’s interesting to look at the various ecommerce sites and their SEO optimization as it is clearly coming into play here.  When you take out the millions of other pages google would have included in the mix, you can start to compare multiple retailers and how they’ve been optimized for organic search.

I’ll have the top ~ 500  ecommerce retail websites in the search engine by Tuesday or so.  I’m currently up to 128 for testing purposes.  The top 500+ ecommerce sites in the US are currently in the search engine which should give a wide array of stores to search.   Over time I’ll add & subtract from the overall list to improve the searching.

I have another search engine in the works for retail industry research.  It should be done in the next week or so. 

If you try it out, please send me an email or leave a comment on how well it works for you.  I’m still trying to tweak it. 

Christine Churchill posted the article Offline Conversion Tracking: The Missing Metric over at Search Engine Land and talks about methods for tracking offline conversion.  Definitely work a look.

Barnes & Noble refreshed their website recently and some of the additions are useful but overall falls short.    When you reach the refreshed site, a 1/3 of the page is dedicated to B&N picks presented in a scrolling flash window.  Unfortunately, you are only given a pause button instead of back/forward/skip a page controls.  This leads to problems when you are interested in an item and you don’t get your mouse up to it quick enough, it’s off the page and you have to wait for a full rotation to get back to it.   It’s also dissappointing that in 2007 the picks are selections chosen by BN without any regard to who I am.  (continue reading…)

Finally a hint of common sense in the USPTO!  The US Patent office just recently rejected the claims of Amazon.com One Click patent after Peter Calveley raised the money from donations to request a re-examination of the patent.  Calveley pointed out multiple patents previously filed to Amazon’s request that may have invalidated their claims. 

 Amazon has the ability to respond to the USPTO and I’m sure they will.  But we all need to cross our fingers that common sense will prevail. 

 Unfortunately, the ecommerce space has been plagued with vague patents with shysters  trying to go around and enforce them.  Many retailers settle the cases which has increased this activity. 

Clearly, patent law needs to be reworked.  Patents like this stifle innovation which isn’t good for anyone.

I’ve been sick this past week so I haven’t been up to posting much, but I did find these two articles that are definitely worth sharing. 

 Werner Vogel’s(CTO of Amazon.com) attached an architecture paper on his blog All Things Distributed.  The paper covers the architecture in place for Amazon’s distributed storage system. 

If storage system architecture for extremely scalable ecommerce sites is not your thing, I saw that Harvard Business Review conducted an interview with Jeff Bezo’s(CEO of Amazon.com).   The interview focuses on strategy and how it’s formulated at Amazon.  The graphic on page 2 showing the product line expansion, feature inclusion and sales revenue is great review of the company looking back. 

Both are definitely worth the read. 

Update:  Recently we released our Top 500 Ecommerce sites which can be looked at from different angles like pagerank, traffic, backlinks, public companies, etc. 

NRF Stores magazine releases a chart with the top 50 ecommerce sites voted on by consumers.

Top 50 Article   Top 50 Chart

Yesterday I attended the JeffNJoe MSDN .NET Tiki Hut Roadshow in Palm Beach.   Jeff and Joe presented Expression Web, Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1, and a mash-up using Virtual Earth.   By far, the most interesting topic was Silverlight, Microsoft’s new Rich Internet Application(RIA) cross browser, cross platform plug-in.  The 1.0 version available now, definitely looks and feels like Adobe Flash, however it has much improved video playback functionality including High Definition playback.  Beyond the use for video, I wouldn’t seriously consider using it for RIA applications on a major ecommerce site because of limitations to available controls, development language availability, and that it’s a 1.0 environment.   Beyond those issues, pervasive adoption of the plug-in is not there yet.  If you decided to utilize Silverlight, your site will probably be the first one that a consumer would be exposed to it, therefore they will have to download the 1.1 meg plug-in and go through the installation, even though Microsoft has made it very seamless and easy to do.

The 1.1 version of Silverlight due out sometime next year on the other hand shows a lot of promise.  Beyond the capabilities existing in 1.0, it is also expected to include support for many controls such as button, textbox, scrollbar, listbox, and checkbox which will bring the basic abilities up to the bare basics compared with Adobe Flex.  You’ll also see support for additional language support beyond javascript including C#, VB.Net, Python, and Ruby.

Three of the most interesting demo’s shown that retailers can relate to were live streaming video of the HSN channel, Silverlight Airlines travel booking, and a prototype  for viewing different home goods and furniture items in a room.  (continue reading…)

After the much talked about change of Borders using Amazon.com to host their site, Borders releases their new beta site.   At first glance the site has a nice design. 

The first thing I noticed was the “Magic  Book Shelf” and immediately got my hopes up for something really cool and useful.  Unfortunately, it’s a Flash object consisting of a static set of books, movies, and music that scrolls through 2-3 pages of 5 books per page.  There was no way of going deeper beyond the initial set of chosen books and navigation is unintuitive to say the least.  I kept trying to drag the focus on the bookshelf to other areas with no effect and found that only selecting the listed menu items on the right had any affect.   It does have a “picked for you” feature once you sign in.  I found the feature to be unhelpful in discovering new books, but hopefully that’s because I don’t have a large purchase history for them to mine from and it will improve with time. 

The site sports a faceted search navigation menu on the left.  Although I was surprised to not find facets for a couple common categories in the fiction section like mystery or true crime.   Also listing the number of books besides the facet is a bit scary with 6293 Action & Adventure books yet only a 122 “Classics”.   I found that when clicking on the Action section, I could only drill down further by format, special features(Abridged, Annotated, Large Print, etc.), price and Best Sellers.  

(continue reading…)

I came across this site XinuReturns.com today that quickly shows you all sorts of SEO stats on your website in a dashboard type format.  From there you can drill into each individual stat so you can try to optimize your site, backlinks, indexed pages, page rankings, keywords and validations.